


Ten Minutes of Eternity

by EldunariLiduen



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005), Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: Gen, Missing Scene, Time Reaver
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-18
Updated: 2016-05-18
Packaged: 2018-06-09 06:11:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6893293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EldunariLiduen/pseuds/EldunariLiduen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I'm a Time Lord. We're not strangers- eternity and I." The Doctor has sacrificed his days, shooting himself with the Time Reavers that Cora brought with her to Calibris, thinking that people would want them for happy things. But he's seen these weapons before and knows what they can do. So he's done the only thing he can do to keep them from falling into the wrong hands. It only takes ten minutes to make an eternity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ten Minutes of Eternity

_One minute_

He was falling. Falling ever so slowly. Falling for years, decades, a century.

No he wasn’t. He wasn’t falling. He was centimeters from sitting down on a cushion. A cushion that Donna had taken from Scully only moments ago.

Or was it years ago?

He couldn’t tell. Conflicting information, conflicting knowledge made it difficult to tell the reality of anything. He knew the facts. He’d shot himself with twenty-some-odd Time Reavers. Weapons that altered the victim’s perception of time. Lengthened milliseconds into hours. Moments into days. A minute into centuries.

It had been seconds ago. It had been _years_ ago.

_Two minutes, three minutes._

Years of being unable to move, unable to breathe, unable to talk- falling all the while.  But it hadn’t been years ago, decades ago. He knew this, and he didn’t know this. Conflicting information poured through his still working mind- a mind that was built to be sensitive to the ebb and flow of time, trying to make sense of it all. He understood now why so many soldiers who’d been assigned to sectors that boasted this weapon returned insane. Oh sure that had always been the theory- it seemed to be basic logic-, but to experience it? Now he _knew_.

His stomach burned where the reavers’ ammunition had entered. Clean entries, at least, with little or no actual damage done. Scars were likely, but they’d barely be visible when the time came. Time.

He could feel every thread of the cloth of his shirt digging into his flesh as his hand remained clutched as if to stop non-existent bleeding. Pressure on the wounds as if there were something to stop from coming out. A gut reaction only adding to already existing, excruciating pain.

_Four minutes._

Pain. Oh, yes there was pain. Every sensation elongated and stretched out over countless years. Well, nearly four hundred of them now if he’d counted right. There wasn’t much else to do besides count. At least counting wasn’t talking to himself- even if there was quite a lot of himself to talk to. What he wouldn’t do for a book or some new or different information at least. Even his eyes were fixed in place. Nothing new to see, even if he could.

Oh, Donna. Donna Noble.

His vision was… strange. Distorted. Echoes of the smallest movements still visible decades later. Or was it just seconds? It was darker, too, but there was no missing that red hair even in the inkiest of nights.  Donna Noble. Standing worried over him for centuries. He’d laugh if he could. He missed her when she left.

_Five minutes, six minutes_.

He wished he could close his eyes. Not because they were drying out or he needed to blink something away, thankfully, no. Sleep had always been a difficult thing for him, but perhaps it would pass this quickly growing eternity somewhat faster if he could just manage to close his eyes…

Time Lords didn’t need much rest compared to most and he abused that fact quite often. Realistically, he only needed an hour or so each night but he could scarcely settle for more than a minute or two at a time before memories of the past- nightmares of dark days more often than not- crowded in, drowning out any other thought or memory that one might wish to have play out for a peaceful night’s sleep or even just a nap. The Time War, the Daleks, Canary Wharf, The Year That Never Was. And that was just scratching the surface. The faces of those he’d lost and those he’d let down.

To sleep and perchance, to dream. Dreams for a hundred years.

Perhaps not.

Oh, all he wanted was rest. And one other thing.

Something not like him.

_Seven minutes._

He’d once explained his relationship with the universe. The ability to feel not just the streams and waves of time, but the spin and weight of a planet, of an entire solar system if he concentrated hard enough. He hadn’t even noticed it at first with the other conflicting heightened and subdued sensations and the dizzy-making disconnect from time, but that was gone too.

No, no, no, no, no.

Wait. No, not completely gone. Just slowed. Or was it? A new panic seized his hearts. He’d had so little in these… oh, what was it now? Six centuries, or the like. He’d had so little in these six _hundred_ years that to find he had lost something now made him feel ill.

Was this how everyone else lived their lives? Unable to know or feel the turn of the ground beneath their feet? Unaware of the beautiful, powerful forces that held their world together?

He couldn’t move. He couldn’t even _feel_ movement.

Frozen. Locked. Trapped. Pinned in place for an impossible amount of time. Nothing to do. Nothing to see. The ice-cold claws of eternity, sinking in.

He could feel it calling him. Rest. Stillness after all the years of his life. Nine hundred years had been a lie even before he’d shot himself. He could feel the call of eternity.

_Eight minutes, nine minutes_.

But if he concentrated he could feel it- something else. The disconnect still made his head spin even after all this time, but- There! There it was! That decade had gone faster than the last. Oh sure it was all subjective but then so were most things. Time, goodness, niceness, what made a story interesting or not- all subjective to individual experience. But he _knew_. Oh, he knew. Finally.

He tried to will it faster, to push back against the effects of the Time Reaver but to no avail. Even a Time Lord couldn’t speed up time. Not without a TARDIS at least. Oh, how he longed to set foot in that impossible, beautiful, magnificent ship. That was all he’d come here for all those centuries ago, anyways. To find parts for that ancient blue box. And Donna thought going to a space garage would be _boring_. Ha.

Well, she was partly right.

_Nine and a half minutes_.

Despite it all, he knew he had been right. Absorbing the power of those weapons had been the only thing to do. Better he who could live through it than even one innocent life tortuously prolonged like this. And if even the smallest particle had made it out, he knew it wouldn’t have been just the one life. Oh, no. Anyone with the power to control time had limitless ability to inflict hurt and pain and death and destruction in an endless cycle. He knew that better than most. The havoc that those twenty-three—

Wait. Twenty-three? That’s what she’d said, wasn’t it?

Then why could he only count twenty-two slowly fading burns in his skin?

Oh no.

Oh _no_.

Donna had looked concerned when he’d last seen her. He’d only just barely been able to work out that she was trying to tell him something about Cora. But what? Well, he had a guess now.

_Ten minutes_.

Pain and anger always went hand in hand. Not at Cora, no. She was just a kid like he’d been nine hundred and something years ago. Well, more like sixteen hundred and something now. Ages. But that was beside the point, his age (whatever it was).

No, he knew what it was like to be a wide-eyed kid. Only wanting to do what you thought best, taking a naive approach to the universe and unaware of how easily something good could be twisted into something evil. He knew what she would try. But he couldn’t let her. No, she didn’t deserve to have to do that, to live with that. He would. What other way would the last molecules of the last Time Reaver be destroyed? What other way was fitting?

_Ten minutes, one second._

So he pushed past the rolling, potentially overpowering wave of sound and sight and smell and movement that deposited him back into the normal stream of time. Shaking, he pushed himself up and scared- Oh, blimey not him. Again? Seriously? Well, fine then he deserved to be scared by the sudden movement.

No he didn’t. He was just trying to get by like everyone else. There really was no harm in a bit of music. However awful. And ear splitting. That explained the larger than he thought it’d be headache, too.

Save that anger, that frustration for the deserving party who would have brought the universe to its knees just to get a little bit ahead in whatever game he’d decided to play.

That ended. Right now.

“Which way did they go? Show me. _Now_.”


End file.
